In 2021 four sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries have experienced a coup d’état. In Chad, the son of the long-lasting President Idriss Deby, who was killed in a war fight after having been in power for over 30 years, suspended both Parliament and government before taking office as Chairman of a Transitional Military Council. Meanwhile, in Guinea, the three-time elected President Alpha Condé was overthrown by a group of army officers. In Mali and Sudan, which had already suffered a coup in 2020 and 2019, respectively, the army removed from power the interim civilian leaders who should have guided the transition to newly elected governments.
These violent takeovers were the last of a series of 90 coups that have occurred in SSA since 1960. The 2019-2021 period, and this year in particular, seems to be reversing a long-term negative trend in the traditionally high frequency of coups that have characterized SSA especially during the post-colonial era (1960-1990). We need to go back 22 years to find such an impressive number of coups in a single year. The Africa Leadership Change (ALC) dataset, which is publicly accessible, allows us to investigate the longitudinal trend of coups as well as the dynamics with which SSA leaders rotate in office more generally. The black line in Figure 1 displays the number of coups that took place in SSA since 1960, by decade. By 1970, only ten years after Africa’s “independence year”, the region had already experienced 20 coups. Another 24 coups occurred between 1971 and 1980, which represents the highest number in all six decades. However, this decreased to 16 violent takeovers in the 1980s and 14 in the 1990s, before dramatically falling to “only” 7 cases in the early 2000s and 5 in the 2011-2020 period, to which we have added in the figure the 4 coups that occurred in 2021.
Figure 1. Number and proportions of coups d’état by decade, 1960-2021
Source: ALC dataset
These data, however, should be understood within a broader context taking into consideration the different ways SSA leaders rotate in office and how the frequency of such changes has varied over time. The dashed line in Figure 1 reports the proportion of coups vis-à-vis the total number of leadership changes that took place since the 1960s. We can observe that the proportion of coups has constantly increased in the first three decades after the countries gained independence. Coups represent 42.6 percent of the total number of leadership changes in the 1960s and 46.2 percent in the 1970s. Between 1981 and 1990, though the absolute number of coups decreased from 24 to 16 compared to the previous decade, they represented an impressive 48.5 percent of the total number of leadership changes, which in this decade was the lowest (33) of the entire post-colonial period. However, violent takeovers grow to 54.5 percent if we also include two instances of guerrilla movements gaining office (Chad in 1980 and Uganda in 1986). Nonetheless, in the 1990s, even if the number of coups only slightly decreased from 16 to 14, their proportion on the total number of leadership changes, which doubled compared to the previous decade (66), fell dramatically to 21.2 percent. This percentage further dropped to 11.9 in the 2000s and then to 7.1 between 2011 and 2020. Even if we add to the 2011-2020 period the four coups occurred in 2021, as in Figure 1, their proportion on the total number of leadership changes (11.5 percent) aligns to that of the early 2000s.
Figure 2. Modes of leadership change in 1960-1989 and 1990-2021
Source: ALC dataset
The decreasing proportion of coups after 1990 is explained by the introduction of multiparty elections in many sub-Saharan countries, which altered the dynamics with which leaders had traditionally rotated in office for the first three post-independence decades. Figure 2 displays the proportion of different modes of leadership change before and after 1990. They are grouped into categories: irregular/violent changes that include coups, guerrilla takeovers, and a few instances wherein leaders were imposed by the former colonial power (as in the Central African Republic in 1979 or in the Comoros in 1995), peaceful but non-electoral handovers and multiparty electoral changes.
In the 1960-1989 period, almost half of the leadership changes took place via irregular/violent means (48.1 percent), while most of the others were peaceful yet non-electoral changes (45 percent). The leaders who took office after winning a multiparty election were a rarity, only 9 cases out of a total of 131 leadership changes, representing a mere 6.9 percent. The opposite scenario emerged after 1990, when almost one out of two new leaders gained office by winning a multiparty election (48.5 percent), even though voting was very often conducted under conditions that cannot be considered fully democratic. At the same time, about one leadership change out of three was peaceful but non-electoral (32.4 percent), while only less than 20 percent of new leaders took power through a coup or another violent mode.
Undoubtedly, the four coups that occurred in 2021 – almost as many as those that occurred over the entire preceding decade – along with the conflict between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray rebel forces represent an alarming signal for the region’s political stability. It is still too early to judge whether these events indicate that the military is back to playing a pivotal role in determining the leaderships of sub-Saharan countries or, instead, represent isolated incidents. In evaluating the impact of coups, however, we should bear in mind that in most sub-Saharan countries multipartyism and democratic reforms have only been introduced in recent years. We have already observed that other countries with a long history of coups, like Benin (5 coups), Ghana (5), and Nigeria (6), were able to reverse this trend and to usher in a new political season characterised by multiparty elections and alternation in government with leaders belonging to competing political forces.
